Cartoon of the Day: Google unveils five SCOOBY-DOO doodles for Halloween

To celebrate Halloween, the fun-lovin' folks at Google have just unveiled, well, a Scooby-Doodle.

As that greatest of Great Danes Scooby-Doo once said: "Rimage ris everything." And to mark the day of sugar-fueled masquerade, Google gives us five images on its home page -- "doodles" that tell a sequential click-through tale featuring Hanna-Barbera's zany teen ghostbusters.

As Scooby, Shaggy and the whole Mystery Machine-traveling gang come upon a haunted scene, part of the engaging "mystery" is hunting out the "Google" logo embedded in the images.

The Hanna-Barbera cartoon show -- created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, who worked with artist/designer Iwao Takamoto -- launched in 1969, and "Scoob" has consistently been with us since in various iterations, including the 2002 CGI/live-action feature film and this month's TV movie, "Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster."

The Great Dane with the telltale speech impediment ("Ruh-roh, Raggy") and voracious appetite (Scooby snacks!) long ago became iconic, as did Scoobert's bell-bottomed and bewhiskered slacker of an owner, the easily spooked Shaggy, and the rest of Mystery Inc.'s sleuthing youths: cravat-happy Fred, the fashionable Daphne and the ever-deductive Velma. (Zoinks, it's, like, all those meddling kids.)

(Update:As a reader suggests, the fact that a lob of a basketball "solves" this five-panel mystery seems a likely allusion to Meadowlark, Curly and the rest of those dribbling detectives, the animated Harlem Globetrotters.)

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